Progress ~ SMT if... - First of ThreeShin Megami Tensei: if...# Posted on October 11th, 2014 05:42 PM by Gideon ZhiHi everyone, I promised updates today, so here they are! This is the first of three: Shin Megami Tensei if...

So I streamed some of the hacking for this a couple of months ago. There hasn´t really been much progress since, though all the remaining hacking is similar to what was done on-stream. That said, there isn´t much left and there´s an anniversary date coming up very, very soon... I´d like to have the game out for then. I´m not promising because we haven´t started playtesting yet and it´s going to be a bit of a push, but right now, that´s the goal.

I´ve added six new screenshots to the end of the game´s slideshow, two of which I´ve attached to this update. They´re things you probably would have seen if you watched the stream or follow me on Twitter, but I´m adding them regardless.

Some folks may remember me remarking how similar the hacking of the game was to SMT2. It is in fact very nearly the exact same engine, but I´ve wanted to make improvements over the SMT2 work. The most notable are the proportional font (which has been in the screenshots since the very beginning) and the expansion of the horizontal space in menus, subscreens, and inventory spaces; where once were two columns now are one, and I´m using the extra space between each row to double up. Gets me a lot more screen real estate.

That´s it for SMT if...; keep your fingers crossed for it.

But now for a bit of somewhat sad related news. I don´t often do this, but today I´m announcing that I´m going to be dropping Megami Tensei 1 and Soul Hackers. I´d originally intended to roll the Megami Tensei 1 work into Kyuyaku Megami Tensei, but The Romhacking Aerie beat me to it; both Megami Tensei 1 and 2 are now playable in their SNES incarnations, and the original Megami Tensei for the NES is, well, not very good regardless. So if you want to play it, go for it! It´s available, just not from here. Soul Hackers is getting dropped because it´s out on the 3DS and there´s not much point. If you want to play it, support Atlus and go buy it.

Progress ~ Crowdsourcing SRW Alpha# Posted on March 1st, 2014 04:51 PM by Gideon ZhiOkay, so, it´s no secret that Super Robot Wars Alpha has a staggeringly huge amount of text. While it only took speed-demon Tyria a year to translate, the text is frankly really messy and wasn´t really suitable for prime-time. As many of you will recall, I started hunting around for an editor shortly thereafter, and settled on Antialias, who I recruited on 4chan´s /m/ board. In the last several years he´s managed to edit about a third of the story dialog text (if we consider duplicate strings to be distinct, anyway) but work has been slow in large part because the script is so dauntingly large.

Some time ago, we decided that it would be a good idea to get multiple workers on the script, but had no real way to manage that. Well, yesterday Antialias set up a Perforce repository on Assembla, and we´re ready to put together a small team. Antialias himself will be handling the vetting process, in large part to to minimize style conflicts. Style conflict is one of the big reasons I didn´t want multiple editors in the first place, but given the size of things, better a little awkwardness in this matter than no translation at all.

Post edit: Things have been moving along at quite a decent clip, so we're not looking for any more editors at the moment. Thanks to everyone who contributed, and expect more news soonish.

Major Release ~ Super Robot Wars 2... twofer! Happy non-denominational holiday!Super Robot Wars 2# Posted on December 24th, 2013 06:47 AM by Gideon ZhiAs Banpresto celebrates the announcement of SRW Z3 and a high-definition remake of the very first SRW, so too does Aeon Genesis. Launching today is the English version of Super Robot Wars 2 for the NES, with a heaping plateful of extras! Included is the previously-advertised optional music persistence patch as well as a patch that will completely remove the hack should you decide you don´t like it. But wait, that´s not all! Thanks to RHDN music guru optomon, we´ve replaced the awkwardly muzaky Tobe! Gundam theme song with Gallant Char, the track used in for UC units in SRW3, EX, and 4. As with music persistence, this patch is entirely optional, comes with a removal patch, and can be applied with any combination of the translation and music persistence patch, or it can just be applied on its own!

As if that weren´t enough, all this is releasing alongside a similarly-complete translation for the officially-emulated version of Super Robot Wars 2 on the GameBoy Advance!! I´ve managed to insert the NES translation into the Famicom Mini version of the game that was released in limited quantities as a promotional contest item. It´s probably inferior to the NES version, but hey, more options! Good stuff. Music Persistence and Gallant Char are both fully functional with the FamiMini version of the game as well, and are included as optional patches (and removal patches) with the translation. Now, this hasn´t been tested extensively, and might be prone to weird issues that may or may not be caused by the translation. It´s really hard to tell, and honestly it was thrown together pretty quickly as a what-if effort. Please report issues and findings on The Pantheon.

Major Release ~ Royal StoneRoyal Stone# Posted on December 12th, 2013 09:35 AM by Gideon ZhiI have an awful lot to do today, so I´m going to keep this short. Royal Stone is done! It´s a neat strategy/RPG for the Game Gear, and it´s the sequel to Crystal Warriors if you´re familiar with that. It´s a dramatic improvement over its predecessor and is easily one of the prettiest games on the platform. Enjoy!

Major Release ~ Ys 5, At Long LastYs V - Kefin, Lost City of Sand# Posted on November 28th, 2013 12:01 AM by Gideon ZhiI must admit, I am at a loss for words writing this. Ys 5 has been a trial in so many ways and it has been in the works for so long that I don´t feel like I could do it justice in a one- or two-paragraph blurb. As such, I will let the translation speak for itself: it is without issue (that I know of), and includes some fairly substantial under-the-hood modifications to data storage and menu structures. Despite how bumpy the road has been, or perhaps because of it, I am intensely proud of this release. Enjoy!

As a further note, earlier this week XSeed Games released Memories of Celceta for the PS Vita, and their Ys releases on Steam are currently on sale. If you enjoy Ys 5 and haven´t bought any other titles in the series, please give XSeed your business. In celebration I´ve updated the translation of Ys 4 Mask of the Sun, of which Memories of Celceta is a remake. This update brings some of the terminology in line with XSeed´s version and includes various other fixes to the text, including the nasty glitchy too-long strings that erased bits of the frame.

I´m going to attempt to keep up a bi-weekly release schedule for the foreseeable future, but I don´t like to make any hard-and-fast promises for something like this unless I´ve already got something very nearly ready for release. I think I can manage it for at least two more, though!

Major Release ~ TwinBee Rainbow Bell Adventure LaunchesTwinBee Rainbow Bell Adventure# Posted on November 14th, 2013 04:20 PM by Gideon ZhiToday sees the release of TwinBee Rainbow Bell Adventure for the SNES! Translation is 100% complete, so enjoy! I´m not going to claim that this is the best platformer on the SNES or even that it´s one of the best, as it frankly can´t hold a candle to Mario, Metroid, Megaman X or Front Mission Gun Hazard (yes, I went there!) But it´s still a damn good game, and if you´re itching for a cute but challenging platformer with plenty of secrets to find, here´s a great chance to have a good scratch.

I´m currently planning another release for two weeks from today. Fingers crossed!

Announcement ~ Announcing TwinBee, Plus Other NewsTwinBee Rainbow Bell Adventure# Posted on November 10th, 2013 11:21 AM by Gideon ZhiFor those of you who´ve been following me on Twitter this won´t exactly be news, but I´m finally announcing a translation project for TwinBee Rainbow Bell Adventure. It´s a cute little platformer for the SNES with a bit of Sonic, a bit of Rocket Knight, and a bit of Mario World all thrown into a blender. Casual fans may note that this did in fact come out in PAL regions; diehard fans will note that said PAL release was heavily stripped-down. The translation restores all that content - the dialog, the endings, the secret exits and twisty map, and the battery-backed saves. It´s almost done, too; unless something goes seriously wrong, expect it within the next week or so.

In other news, SRW2´s betatest progresses well. We´ve hit one major issue: a buffer overflow with the unit screen which I´m not quite sure how to fix just yet. But things are otherwise fairly clean, so hopefully that´ll be out by the end of the year.

Also, hacking for Ys 5 has been completed as well. The edit progresses apace, and we´re hoping to have the translation out on Thanksgiving Day. Of course, given how beastly the project has been, things could always go badly awry in the meantime. Keep your fingers crossed!

Progress ~ Ys 5 Can Now Be BeatenYs V - Kefin, Lost City of Sand# Posted on October 30th, 2013 05:44 PM by Gideon ZhiBack in May, I quietly discovered several reasons that Ys 5´s translation was crashing the game. I counted at least 60 such bugs, all of which caused the game to die in horrible ways, and despite having those fixed for his most recent playthrough in the last couple of weeks Deuce still encountered over a dozen more crashes, several of which required modification to compressed assembly code, which is really nasty business. Regardless, the game can now be beaten without it crashing, and as sad as it may sound this is a massive step forward for the project.

Unfortunately, this is not to say that the game is done, or even close. The text still needs to be edited, there is still a large amount of menu work that needs to be done, and some of the game´s visual effects are broken. Examples of the broken stuff will be found in my twitter gallery, but the game´s gallery page has been updated with 23 fresh screenshots of functional text.

This is one of a few projects I´d like to have done by the end of the year. Due to a variety of circumstances (including a job hunt) I´m not sure if that´s going to be possible, but it´d certainly be nice!

Announcement ~ Welcoming SRW2 Back Into the FoldSuper Robot Wars 2# Posted on October 4th, 2013 07:18 AM by Gideon ZhiOver the years I can think of exactly three projects I´ve ever completely dropped - that is, three projects I removed from the website entirely. One of those was the Japanese version of Castlevania 2: Simon´s Quest, which is now being done by these fine folk here. The second was Granhistoria, an odd little RPG published by Banpresto on the Super Famicom, but I´m not going to be talking about Granhistoria... at least, not today. Today I´m announcing the triumphant return of the Super Robot Wars 2 translation.

I´ve honestly been poking at SRW2 on and off for quite some time. Several years back I was given a hack to help with some extra text space, though I don´t believe this ever found its way into the current build of the translation. I´d redumped the game´s script at around that time and would mention it offhand to people who might be interested, but it was never really a priority.

So last February I re-redumped the script and gave it to TheMajinZenki, who was responsible for the JoJo´s Bizarre Adventure and Royal Stone text translations. (He and I have a few other things brewing by the way, but nothing I´m really willing to talk too much about just yet.) He returned the script to me a month later, and I immediately set to work trying to get it back into the game - only to discover that one of the text banks was badly over-size and that the routine printing said text was shared by a number of the larger graphic elements of the game, so my usual trickery would not work. It was back to the old slash-and-burn tactics of pruning it bit-by-bit until it finally fit into its bank. This is thankless work, and at the time I was busy with my last semester of higher education and still working a full-time job, so SRW2 was not a priority. I also wanted to see if I could manage some kind of workaround for the text, but everything was coming up blank.

Well, this past Monday I sat down with the file and pruned it ´til it fit. I´m not proud of some of the cuts I had to make, but the perfect is the enemy of the good as the saying goes and SRW2 looks pretty good as it is. Then over the next two days I got the rest of the text inserted and hacked up a couple of routines, and now the project is very nearly done; all that really remains is for someone to come in and clean up Zenki´s script a bit and we´ll be ready for testing.

So! Hopefully this will be out soon. I´ve been poking a couple of hornets´ nests in the hopes of getting an editor to come chasing after the script with all the fervor of an angry hive but so far nobody´s really bitten. We´ll see how things progress from here.

Incidentally, those of you who´ve played both older and newer SRWs will appreciate a fairly small hack I performed on SRW2 to get the robots´ battle theme music to stay after combat scenes end. This will be provided with the patch as an optional accessory, and as a bonus it doesn´t even need the translation - if you prefer playing the game in Japanese for whatever reason, the music patch will still work. I´ll be providing a patch to reverse the hack as well.

Progress ~ Major Progress on Royal StoneRoyal Stone# Posted on April 25th, 2013 04:20 PM by Gideon ZhiJust dropping a quick word about Royal Stone´s recent dramatic progress. In the last few weeks TheMajinZenki, who you might know as the translator for the recent JoJo´s patch, has been tearing through the game´s script. All of the text unrelated to the actual progression of the story has been inserted, though admittedly only about 90% of it works correctly at the moment. He´s also translated roughly the first two thirds of the main story dialog; I´ve edited and inserted about half of that. I´ve also done a huge pile of work on the technical aspects of the project, including cracking the compression the game uses for its introduction and its combat menus, as well as the sprite data it uses for pause menus. The game is currently playable with only minor issues through Round 5, and all this in the space of a couple of weeks!

I´ve taken 24 screenshots, some of which you may recognize but most of which are new. With a little luck I should have more news for you soon!